About

About

AOV was born from a recognition that various Arctic Observing networks needed a tool – beyond project tracking systems and data catalogs – to strategically assess status and progress for long-term monitoring programs. A new, intermediate level of “granularity” (between project-level information and dataset-level information) was needed in a portal that focused on locations, activities, and resources. These are encapsulated in this mapping application as “observing sites.” AOV is evolving and growing, founded on the principle that collaborative information sharing can provide a comprehensive – and therefore useful – perspective.

Vision

Arctic Observing – spread as it is among various national and international initiatives – could benefit from an improved cyber-infrastructure that facilitates further integration, discovery, and analysis between funding bodies, PIs, data centers, users, etc. One piece of that vision is to have an observing activity for the observing program – beyond individual projects, datasets, and individual agency or initiative efforts – to enable strategic assessment.

Scope

Funded initially by the U.S. NSF Arctic Sciences Section, the viewer is becoming broadly interagency for U.S. efforts. Information exchange with international entities is welcomed. The viewer is circumpolar, and includes sites for marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric observing activities. AOV is primarily for policy makers, program managers, science planners, logistics planners, and data management specialists. It also may be of interest to researchers, students, the media, and the public.

For the programmatic and strategic assessment of Arctic Observing efforts, an intermediate level resource is needed. This should not be a data portal, because details such as sensor names, serial numbers, etc. – and the datasets themselves – are more appropriately maintained at the data archives. And it should not be a project tracking system, which would lack the “spatial granularity” needed for tracking specific data collection activities.

Rather, this resource should focus on observing sites, with a bare minimum of metadata fields for ease, comprehensiveness, timeliness, and interoperability. Agencies and organizations tied to Arctic Observing can take advantage of the new application, and can use the collaborative and distributed web services as a tool for their own purposes, to systematically and comprehensively assess progress, to optimize sampling designs, and to know where to invest in new deployments.

This website is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Contract No. NSFDACS11C1675. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Milestones

12/2018 - Over 4,000 new sites have been added to AOV across multiple networks, especially NEON. The Viewer now has over 19,000 observing sites!

11/2018 - An alert system has been established to detect unexpected server downtime, improving reliability of our web services and Viewer.

11/2018 - NEON has become a Partner. A fruitful collaboration has added thousands of sites to AOV via their JSON API. We are working on adding thousands more, and to further refine harmonization of their site-level metadata.

11/2018 - A total of 491 new sites have been added to AOV across four networks: NEON, NASA ABoVE, and IABP. Also, backfilling and normalizing was accomplished for existing site records in the database, as part of an ongoing QC effort to improve Search and the overall user experience.

10/2018 - A new AOV Map Gallery page has been created, with summary maps that can be easily downloaded for presentations etc. Please let us know if you'd like to see other maps featured there.

10/2018 - Our database and Viewer have shifted to new servers for better speed and stability. At no cost to the project, we have moved away from an aging systems architecture to a cloud-based solution offered by the University of Texas El Paso. There will be less effort spent by the Team on server maintenance, and users will benefit from better performance overall.

10/2018 - The Team continues to contribute to various planning and coordination activities, including the IARPC Arctic Observing and Arctic Data subteams, the IASC/SAON Arctic Data Committee, and related working groups focused on federated search, semantics, and data interoperability, with direct and indirect benefits to ARMAP and AOV.

09/2018 - An article in Nature Ecology & Evolution, which cites ARMAP, highlights the need for strategic inventories such as ARMAP and AOV to better assess gaps and avoid sampling biases in Arctic Observing.

09/2018 - The AOV Team has ramped up collaboration with NOAA across multiple fronts, with demos and progress toward inclusion of additional sites from several NOAA networks.

09/2018 - More than 200 new observing sites have been added to AOV in the latest refresh, with additional buoys and moorings across multiple networks: IABP, DBO, BGEP, NOAA NDBC, NOAA EcoFOCI, and NOAA AOP. Many of these networks are new to AOV.

08/2018 - The AOV Team has started collaboration with NEON to get all of their sites into the Viewer by harvesting from their web service.

08/2018 – ARMAP and AOV continue to prepare the next generation of innovators through cyberinfrastructure training for graduate students. Lead developer Ari Kassin, PhD Comp. Sci., will further his career as a GIS Analyst and Database Programmer with the City of El Paso. Mauricio Barba, MSc Elect. & Comp. Eng., has stepped into the lead programming role.

08/2018 - The AOV Team has continued to work closely with Isaaffik on interoperability and information exchange.

07/2018 - A big update was made with additional sites for the EarthScope IRIS network.

07/2018 - The “Observatories and Stations” map layers have been greatly expanded to highlight facilities including YOPP, NEON, LTER, an all encompassing “Arctic Research Stations” layer, and a revamped “US Logistics Hubs” layer.

06/2018 – To assist with sharing of project-level information, an ARMAP Data Dictionary has been released on the AOV Interoperability page, with a listing of relevant fields and their definitions, etc. Also, the project-level ISO template XML was updated slightly.